Tweetie for the iPhone (direct iTunes Link) and for the Mac are by far my two most favorite twitter clients. The Mac version that has been release just two weeks ago has replaced the Adobe AIR powered TweetDeck and besides some version 1.0 quirks I’m pretty happy with it.

As atebits – the maker of both – does not seem to listen nor respond to their two twitter accounts (@atebits and @tweetie), I thought I might start a list of enhancement ideas here. A blog post is also a bit more sticky as compared to the flow of tweets on the @atebits timeline.

I understand that some of these requests might not be ideally suited for the less-than-ideal twitter API but maybe the great folks at atebits find a way to work around it.

Tweetie for the iPhone

Grey out the “Direct Message” button if the user is not following me. Letting me type in a message and telling me that it cannot be send afterwards is just not the right way of doing it. Maybe it’s been done this way because of the way the twitter API is structured, but it still needs to be fixed.

Add a “Resend on reconnect” option if the user tries to send a message but the iPhone lost the data connect.

Add the typical iPhone “new message badge” to the “Mentions” and “Messages” tabs and maybe also to the Tweetie home screen icon itself. Upcoming Push Notifications might be of great help here and open up a whole new world of possibilities.

Think about introducing the option to auto-add a language hash tag (#en, #de) to tweets and allow client-side filtering by language.

You might even go further: Have the client automagically find out the language of tweets and allow filtering. (For as long, as twitter does not introduce language as a first class citizen to their entity model.)

Register a custom URL scheme (think tw://…) to allow other iPhone apps to invoke Tweetie and submit tweets. I’d love to see integration in e.g. Byline and other RSS readers that would allow direct tweet of links to articles of interest.

Tweetie for the Mac

Integrate the followers/following list into the native interface instead of launching the twitter.com website. If users run multiple twitter accounts, it currently gets confusing. You might have that on your list anyway but wanted to rush with releasing the initial version. That’s ok. Now simply fix it, please.

Add an option to have the dock icon indicating activity and unread tweets (take a look at Adium and simply copy the implementation).

That’s it so far. I’ll keep expanding this list as more ideas will come to my mind. Feel free to add yours to the comments.

I would love to see them implementing the feature to disable the dock icon. Tweetie is always running on my machine and I don’t need the menu bar icon PLUS the dock icon. I would prefer just having the menu bar icon activated.

I agree about the badges for mentions and direct messages on the iPhone app. Currently I have to switch to those screens to check if I have any mentions or messages. It doesn’t seem like that should be the case. I recently switched to Tweetie from Twinkle and I’d like to add a couple of features to the wishlist besides the notification badges:

First, I’d like for Tweetie to keep my recently viewed tweets cached or something, the way Twinkle does, so that when I open the app there are already tweets on the screen and it simply has to load new ones. I shouldn’t have to see a completely blank screen when I open the app; it should display older tweets that it loaded last time it was open.

Also, it would be nice if Tweetie located me and loaded the data for all screens in the background after it finished loading my main timeline. This way if I wanted to switch from my tweets to my direct messages or the Nearby screen, I wouldn’t have to wait again for each one to load on its own. All the data should be fetched automatically, giving precedence to the main stream of course.

Finally, I’d just like to be able to change which icons are in the bottom bar. Many apps have this feature via an Edit button on the More screen that allows you to put screens from More onto the navigation bar and vice-versa so that you can customize the app by the functions you use most. I hardly ever use Favorites, so I’d like to replace that button with Nearby, to mimic the way it was set up in Twinkle.

Just a couple more minor things…I’d like to be able to delete tweets from either the iPhone or desktop app (seems like a pretty basic feature for both to be missing) and the option to see my @mentions in my main stream instead of separating them into their own screen (maybe differentiated with a different color…I really liked Twinkle’s implementation of this). But the latter would be a pretty significant design change so I don’t really have my hopes up about that.